Kierkegaard's printing errors: on a curious passage from "Stages on life's way"

While the indirect communication is a well-known 'signature piece' of Kierkegaard's writing, this paper explores the ambiguities which this medium necessarily carries the deception, mistake and mis-reference at work throughout his expression of authentic singular existence. The paper takes a cryptic passage from the book Stages on Life's Way, where the reader is asked to consider a list of printing errors found in a book which contains a more expressive reading than the book it corrects, as a means to explore the role of such errors within the idea of indirect communication. It suggests that focusing solely on the distinctive and original 'philosophical' meaning of the passage is overly-reductive to the creative possibilities of error and reproduction that Kierkegaard's work opens, and in particular the ways in which these reflect the 'pseudological' ground upon which indirect communication takes place.